I could write a book about my experience learning Spanish after I moved to Spain years ago. I'll summarize:
1. Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours. You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day. I wasted 6 months thinking it would someday just happen magically. It won't.
2. No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes... Except your significant other. They'll have the patience because they love you. Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English, or just smile and wave you off.
3. Hire a private tutor. I went to see a wonderful older woman named Nieves every day after work for 18 months. It was the only real way to chisel a language into my thick skull. She was part therapist, part cultural liaison and part drill master.
Y mas que diez años despues, no he olvidado mucho. Bueno, nunca podria escribir muy bien, pero puedo charlar con otros hispanohablantes sin mucho esfuerzo. Excepto los Argentinos. No tengo ni idea que estan diciendo por nada.
I really like drills. I posted a 'A Short Guide to Independent Language Learning' on Reddit last year, it also has some advice about how to work with a tutor:
Plug: Over last couple of months, me and a friend made an extension for studying languages with Netflix, we are quite pleased with how it's turning out:
Pro Tip: Go to Latin America (ok, maybe not Argentina in your case), there people have much more time and will talk to you on the street. Try to avoid capitals or quasi-capitals though.
>Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English
Due to this I decided to do immersion in Colombia and lived outside of the gringo neighborhood. No one in my neighborhood spoke English and I was forced to communicate in Spanish when buying groceries, the sim card I bought didn't work, taking tennis lessons, ordering food, etc.
Almost 2 years of using Duolingo, German, here. At this point, I can understand the very basics and even less when it comes to speaking.
Here's what I learned about duo
- Good to get you started on the language
- It's very good at keeping you engaged initially
- Hard to remember everything so at some point you find it hard to understand the new lessons. There's a language deficit that eventually catches up with you.
- It's not bad to get you started but long term it's not the best way to learn.
If I had to do it again:
-I'd say use it for a few months while it keeps you engaged(6months?) along with a system where you are forced to speak it. Like the Pimsleur system.
- Find someone to speak it with on a regular basis as soon as possible.
- Continue with Pimsleur and dump Duo.
- Immerse your self with the media in the Language you are trying to learn.
The absolute fact is that you can never be fluent in a language unless you speak it on a regular basis so move towards it ASAP.
There's no substitute for determination. Eventually, you just have to fight the feeling of wanting to quit once it gets difficult. By the way, wanting to quit is a sign that you are about to take a major step forward if you can fight through it and move forward.
This mirrors my experiences with Duolingo. I tried it out, and realized that it went against my ideas about learning languages: translation, no person involved, no real communication. Maybe they'll remedy some of these, as the article notes, but I feel very strongly that translation like this is nearly useless busy-work, and further, harmful. When I learn a language, I use translation to look words up, but strive to expose myself to rich language. By this I mean large amounts of language, some of it near my level (textbook dialogues), some of it way above (an audiobook of favorite book), as interest dictates. In addition I write people in the language and make friends on sites like italki, or in apps like HelloTalk and Tandem. I don't worry about learning words, nearly ever. I just expose myself to them and look them up when I 'notice' them (my brain: oh, this word is interesting, we've heard it before... What does it mean?). I hate translation when learning with a passion, and listen a lot to get away from it.
Results (N=1, YMMV) have been fantastic with Russian. It's strong enough now that it messes with my English and I can make the same mistakes a Russian/Ukrainian would in English if I've been using Russian a lot.
Learning languages is cool, and it opens so many doors and connects you with all sorts of people. If Duolingo works for someone, great. From working as a tutor and getting to know lots of students, you'd be better off doing what I talk about above, but something is better than nothing, and perfect is the enemy of good here.
Strongly second "expose yourself to a lot of the language" from my own experience with Spanish. Lot easier to get that exposure now than a decade or two ago, too.
Some specifics re: more exposure, and getting that through the Internet: Music's good and some folks like shows on Netflix and so on. Follow folks on Twitter, etc., who are into topics you follow but speak the other language. Physical Kindles let you set a custom dictionary as default and long-press-to-lookup. Google Translate is handy as a souped-up dictionary, not so reliable to really translate anything you can't yourself. Easy to add support for the second language to your keyboard, and even change the computer/phone/etc. language once you feel ready for that. Generally, different sources tend to help with different vocabulary and so on (people use slang on Twitter and different words in news stories than fiction, say). It helps to take an interest in more than just the language itself, e.g., the culture, politics, and so on of places it's spoken.
I kind of like that 0x38B's list has a lot of things that aren't on mine (audiobooks, sites like italki, etc.). Shows that there are a lot of ways at this.
Talking with folks obviously provides something any amount of passive exposure doesn't (and is the point of it, after all!). My wife grew up speaking Spanish, and deserves a ton of (all the?) credit for what I've learned of it. Travel is great as much as you can. You need some reality checks re: what you really know and opportunities to get corrections.
Consulting grammar stuff definitely helped me. Eventually formal classes make sense because they zoom in on the corner cases that it'd take a long time to experience enough organically. Classes wound up helpful later than I initially thought; somewhere in the middle of this process I wanted to hit verb charts, but I ended up only getting comfortable with common tenses by just using them and listening for them a lot (and getting things wrong a fair amount at first).
Watch out for aging. My mom spoke French and Spanish aside from English. As she aged, she reads both and doesn’t understand why we can’t read too. My wife has a patient that speaks five languages. Her husband speaks 3 of them. As the patient’s illness progresses, she starts talking in a random language. Sometimes she gets lucky and it’s one of 3 her husband speaks.
My approach: be in country, do the Pimsleur audio course, obsessively bang out vocab flash cards in the native script, study grammar every morning for 2-3 hours, and (the secret sauce) live with a s.o. who speaks the target language exclusively. Six months is enough to be comfortably conversational. I did it three times, and the last was so successful that the next would require a divorce!
Where do people get the idea one resource is supposed to teach you a language? As someone who has learned and uses multiple foreign languages Rosetta stone, pimsleur, duo linguo are all fantastic tools for their indended use cases but language requires reading, writing, listening(to natives), speaking and many other smaller skills. With just whats available on the internet and mail you could learn a language in a matter of years but so many people complain because 1 app didn’t teach them in 3 months what it took their entire life to learn in their native language.
In the end, I did pretty well in Rome, engaging in simple, fractured semi-conversation in most of my encounters. Was that how the app was supposed to work?
Yeah, I'd say that if you were going to solely use Duolingo this is what a reasonable person would hope to achieve. Italian isn't foreign to you like it was when you started, but it's not going magically be familiar because you practiced on Duolingo every day. Honestly that sounds like a really good outcome for the investment so far, and what a big motivator to explore other avenues of gaining proficiency.
Outside of Duolingo, there are two major methods of language learning. One is to aim for deliberate practice and excellence in everything. For reading, it means reading a passage over and over until you have basically memorized it and then going on to the next thing to master. For listening, it means listening to the sane video or audio over and over until your brain can process all of it flawlessly.
The other school is to just dive in. Start listening to business radio in the new language, sing along with songs, make mistakes with native speakers constantly. Learn by context.
The reality is there is no one method, no magic bullet. It may be a combination of things that work for you. Just like dieting, it is not one size fits all. However, as you venture out from Duolingo, you will find what works for you. What your strengths and weaknesses are with regards to learning another language as an adult.
The hardest thing for me was dealing with the slow progress. You may even get frustrated. However, if you don’t give up, what was hard will become easier and what was easy will become like breathing.
It is a personal journey, we can give you prescriptive advice but the doing is what matters.
If it takes 3 years instead of 6 months, no one cares. And you should not.
Same. Spent a lot of time on Duolingo trying to learn French, couldn't understand anything a French waitress asked me. Surprisingly, I can now understand a lot of written French, but maybe that's normal for English+Spanish speakers?
I recently found Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/), a free cross-platform app for index card-style learning. Their shared decks seem useful, and I like that you can customize exactly how you practice, though of course its effectiveness in "conversational" practice is obviously limited.
One difficulty with French is that their system of stress makes it very hard for a beginner to know when one word ends and another begins. I lived in France for a few years, and I was initially surprised that after a few months of working hard at it, I could still sometimes understand Spanish and Italian a little more easily than French (even though I don't speak them at all), just because they have per-word stress like English, but French is unusual (for Europe at least) in having per-phrase stress (not sure of the technical term for that, but I'm sure it's a thing). That was extremely frustrating. But it passed... I'd say it took about 3-4 months of immersion to learn enough stock phrases (waiters say "Vous désirez ?" and other stock protocol phrases you just get used to) and common slang, and train my ear to understand the way words melt into each other (liaisons in real life, omitted words, strange sound transformations that no one ever tells you about... I like the aspiration that appears at the end of some words in the Paris accent, I do it myself, but I can't tell you the rule for it). You just can't learn that stuff from a book or whatever. I think I was relatively good at it (at least, much better than the other English speakers in our circle, but not as good as a couple of others whose foreignness I couldn't hear at all, so they knew tricks I didn't), and I put that down to vast amounts of immersive discussion in real life and also on IRC, where I could see people transcribing what they actually say.
I found the same when I was learning French through Duolingo.
I could read French fairly well, I could write a bit too, although it was very formulaic. Sometimes I'd be able to speak a bit of French to someone and they might understand me through my thick New Zealand accent (which is apparently incredibly cute to French people), but I could barely understand a word of French spoken to me.
The big problem with Duolingo in my opinion is the computer generated French audio sounds nothing like actual French.
Jokes apart, this is what I think. If you want to learn conversational Italian to be able to spend some time in Italy, the best way to learn what you need is actually to go to Italy and practice there. Most Italians would love to practice some English with you, and to teach you Italian. You will have a great time. You will have fun. You will remember your holiday when you're older.
Not only do I agree with you (I'm also Italian LOL) but I wanted to add that, in my experience, what you said also applies to pretty much every other language. I've learned a few languages that way, mostly speaking with people on the street while travelling, and only occasionally reading language books or taking lessons.
PS (however I'm not saying that books or lessons are useless, their importance depends on the kind of language skills you want to acquire)
I spent about a year studying Italian on Duolingo and had a positive experience. But I also augmented Duolingo with Anki: I made flashcards for every single word I learned in Duolingo, and went over them every day. That really helped me memorize the vocabulary. I also got a workbook on verb conjugations to practice those (I didn't end up finishing that workbook and my verb conjugations are weak).
The real benefit of Duolingo is that I can do it while I'm waiting for my coffee order, or on the train. My only free time is spontaneous, and in short increments; e.g., 5 minutes here and there, unexpectedly. It's hard to learn anything in that context! I'm surprised I learned Italian as well as I did! Taking a class in Italian with a human teacher would no doubt be superior, but I unfortunately don't have time for that!
I got excited and almost learned Spanish, Japanese, German, then I realized I was simply addicted [1]. The good part is that at least it gave me the confidence to speak to people in different languages thinking I made sense, even though I didn't. The confidence to make mistake is how you end up learning anyway.
It took me some time to understand how to properly use Duolingo, but I feel like I have found a solution that genuinely fits into my learning strategy. My first attempt was with German. I studied for months and months during breaks at work, but I was no match for conversing at the local German meetup or in Berlin. I could read books and read signs, but in know way could I hold a conversation. I was very disappointed, but I have absolutely retained my knowledge of reading German.
The language I'm currently learning is Vietnamese. I'm learning because my girlfriend's family is Vietnamese and it's a lot of fun to share another language with her and her relatives. I've disabled all of the score-related addons and purchased the offline version. I can hold myself to two lessons on my train home from work without any dopamine rushes. I find it substantially easier than bringing along a thick workbook (which I do have) or trying to force my way through an ebook. The sentence structure helps me more than flashcards. When I go home, I can practice actual conversations with my girlfriend and we can share the vocabulary we know (her grasp of the language isn't perfect). It works extraordinarily well for me. We don't have the time or energy to attend night classes like we thought we would so trading phrases every now and then works pretty well.
One of the apps which really stuck with me was "Human Japanese" - Years later the stuff that I learnt is still as embedded in my memory as when I first saw it.
I've found that the Pimsleur method is very good (at least at the beginning/intermediate levels), but is mostly auditory. I think this leveraged the creator's research on timed reinforcement learning. I imagine something like this paired with Duolingo to provide visuals would be pretty effective.
I studied Spanish for years but never really learned it until I was immersed for a few months. Now that I don’t use it often I find it to be a struggle to retain.
I’ve been toying with language apps myself. I still think there’s a place for apps. For example, I have an iOS Word Search game for several languages:
1. Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours. You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day. I wasted 6 months thinking it would someday just happen magically. It won't.
2. No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes... Except your significant other. They'll have the patience because they love you. Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English, or just smile and wave you off.
3. Hire a private tutor. I went to see a wonderful older woman named Nieves every day after work for 18 months. It was the only real way to chisel a language into my thick skull. She was part therapist, part cultural liaison and part drill master.
Y mas que diez años despues, no he olvidado mucho. Bueno, nunca podria escribir muy bien, pero puedo charlar con otros hispanohablantes sin mucho esfuerzo. Excepto los Argentinos. No tengo ni idea que estan diciendo por nada.
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